Friday, October 12, 2007

You can feel the intellectual vacuum from here.

... Laws of logic are God’s standard for thinking. Since God is an unchanging, sovereign, immaterial Being, the laws of logic are abstract, universal, invariant entities. In other words, they are not made of matter—they apply everywhere and at all times. Laws of logic are contingent upon God’s unchanging nature. And they are necessary for logical reasoning. Thus, rational reasoning would be impossible without the biblical God.

The materialistic atheist can’t have laws of logic. He believes that everything that exists is material—part of the physical world. But laws of logic are not physical. You can’t stub your toe on a law of logic. Laws of logic cannot exist in the atheist’s world, yet he uses them to try to reason. This is inconsistent...

Rational thinking, science, and technology make sense in a Christian worldview. The Christian has a basis for these things; the atheist does not. This is not to say that atheists cannot be rational about some things. They can because they too are made in God’s image and have access to God’s laws of logic. But they have no rational basis for rationality within their own worldview.

Ok, I think I got it. Since everything is the creation of God, anything an atheist makes use of does not really exist because he or she is applying something the genesis of which he or she cannot acknowledge...and therefore...

In its first iteration, Chrtisatianity was a rational religion. The earliest leaders of the Church articulated their faith and doctrine in the language of reason and logic, the rhetoric they had been taught in the Roman and Greek schools. Reasonand logical discourse became not so much a tradition but a habit brought forward from the earliest days of the Church, through the decline of the Empire in the West, and into the society and culture in Western Europe that eventually replaced Roman society.

While the Church's adherence to reason and logic was not always perfect, even the mystical doctrines of the Church were articulated in the language of reason and logic. Reason and logic became habits of thought in the West, not only in the Church but in the society and culture the Church sponsored and grew in the West.

The links of religion to reason and logic broke down during the second wave of the Protestant Reformation. when the theology of an imminent God, the right of everyone who could read to interpret the Bible, biblical literalism and certain other doctrines took root. These theologians and their followers, whether described as Huguenots, Puritans or Anabaptists, were not well-received by the Crowned Heads of Europe, who generally eased them out of their own nations. Eventually, we were inflicted with a plague of these peoples in North America.

An imminent God is in the nature of a Divine Meddler, who interfers day-to-day in the lives of his creatures, rewarding his friends and punishing their enemies. The imminent God is locked in a Manichaean struggle with Lucifer, however dscribed, one of his defiant angels, who is also imminent and also interfers in the day-to-day lives of God's creatures. This battle, between the white magic of God and the black magic of the devil, contributes an aura of drama and substance to the lives of fundamentalists that raises their otherwise simple and boring lives to the majestic.

The other major view of God — transcendental — is the familiar theory of the Prime Mover, who set creation in motion, under a rule-based regieme, and gave his most favored earthly creatures —man— we can argue later whether that includes that Divine Afterthought, woman — not jut the ability to reason but free will, and its corollary, personal responsibility. Under the transcendental theory, God actually respects his favored creatures, sits back and lets them exercise their free will, with the caveat, of course, that they each will be held to account in the end. This theology is magic-free and accomodates Darwin as nothing more than a search for God's rules, as applied to the origen of species.

By stripping Christianity of its reason and logic, fundamentalists have reduced Christianity to the level of the pagan religions Christianity was thought to have replaced.

Which brings us around, in this brief discussion, to Harry Potter. The reason fundamentalists, who today call themselves Christians, go crazy over Harry Potter is that they actually believe in magic and further believe that any magic other than God's own magic is black magic. Yes, to today's Christian, Harry Potter is demonic. Certainly, ever right-thinking person wants to protect society from the devil.

Seer, you are talking about the 2nd century? When christianity adopted pagan and many other religion's concepts in order to appeal the masses?

hey, why isn't jesus written about or recorded until 70 years after his supposed life? Herod was a stickler for recfording current events, but nothing exists that mentions christian oppression and crucifications, let alone a particular leader being persecuted?Just funny, how much greeks and romans wrote about their times, but nada on Jesus the fucking christ!